How Advancements in Automation Can Alleviate the Talent Shortage
Of all the challenges plaguing manufacturers in recent years, none loom larger than the talent shortage. According to the Deloitte 2022 Manufacturing Industry Outlook, record numbers of unskilled jobs are likely to limit productivity and growth through the end of the year — a perhaps unsurprising statistic for anyone who saw last year’s predicted shortfall of 2.1 million skilled labor jobs by 2023. In that same study, Deloitte revealed that while the 1.4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs lost in the early days of the pandemic have returned, the workers have not.
Why It Matters
“Unfortunately, millennials, Gen Xers and Gen Zers show very limited interest in working in manufacturing,” says Will Healy III, a leader at Universal Robots with the Advanced Manufacturing Industry Partnership (AMIP) in Cincinnati. “Boomers are leaving manufacturing faster than younger generations are entering — and this is complicated further by the skills gap.”
In their 2021 analysis, Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute reported 36% of new entrants to the job market (or their parents) had no interest in the industry. Even with interest, a lack of quality STEM education and job training makes openings hard to fill.
So, where do we go from here? According to Healy, all roads lead to automated systems. He shared his insights with us to demonstrate how advancements in automation and robotics can make a real impact in extending the manufacturing workforce.
Automation Keeps Experienced Workers on the Job
To fulfill production demands and keep businesses running, we must simultaneously retain the workers we have while creating attractive manufacturing jobs for younger generations entering the workforce. As our more experienced workers get older and approach retirement age, how can we extend their careers and make the final years of their careers more enjoyable? How can we leverage the institutional technical knowledge in their heads?
Instead of watching the baby boomers in our organizations be pushed out the door by the physical demands of the job, automation and robotics can extend their careers by allowing them to focus on knowledge skills while the automation does the strenuous parts of the tasks. Key employees can stay in their jobs longer, if they want to continue to work, and manufacturers can flatten the retirement spike in their organizations.
Welcome to the Robot Revolution
Case in point: the welding industry, where a lack of skilled labor is not a new phenomenon, but the pandemic and macroeconomic factors accelerated the problem. According to data from the American Welding Society, there is a current shortfall of approximately 84,000 welders in the United States alone — and that trend is unlikely to reverse course in the coming years.
So, what options do manufacturers have for the short term and into 2030? For many weld operations, collaborative robots are fast becoming the building block to start automating manufacturing operations, due to the following factors:
- Low installed cost enables even the smallest shop to automate. Unlike traditional automation, collaborative solutions have successfully stripped costs out of every phase of a typical project. It is common now to see complete systems in machine tending, welding and palletizing deployed for less than $100,000 — often less than $85,000.
- Cobots enable incremental automation. Unlike the traditional all-or-nothing approach, the ability to safely deploy cobots side-by-side with skilled operators allows a single station, machine or process to be automated. Automate one cell, generate ROI, and then proceed to incrementally automate more operations.
- Cobots are quick to deploy (see No. 1 above). They’re also quick to re-deploy, making them perfect for high-mix/low-volume operations.
- Best-in-class cobots are easy to program. They do not require dedicated teams of engineers and programmers.
- Cobots attract talent. As the owner of a welding operation in Montana recently told us, “We find that we get a real sparkle in people’s eyes when we say, ‘We’ve got a robot on the crew!’”Or a sheet metal manufacturer in Ohio who told us,“We want to be known as a technology company that happens to do metal parts. Because then we can attract the talent to allow us to take us the next step.”
The Art of Staying Competitive: Smart Technology and Connected Devices (IoT)
For manufacturers looking to overcome their workforce and production challenges, smart technologies are imperative. But without first building the right company foundation, the best and more innovative technologies can fail, collecting dust in a corner. Manufacturers need to engage the people in the workforce. Front line workers run the business and know where the improvements need to be made. Then good processes need to be documented or created. Only then does a technology have a chance to succeed.
I see three key, “low-hanging-fruit” technologies for manufacturers to embrace amid today’s supply-chain challenges and workforce shortages that will create value for any fabricator looking to remain competitive:
- Condition monitoring/predictive maintenance/machine learning technologies
- Material handling / intralogistics robotics
- The powerfully re-deployable collaborative robots
- For condition monitoring devices, from sensors directly mounted to quadruped robots with sensor packages, the ability to detect deviations from normal equipment operation with vibration or temperature or sound is a powerful tool for chemical coaters, welders and fabricators of all sizes. The more manufacturers can eliminate unplanned breakdowns and high-pressure repair situations, the safer, more productive and happier our work environments become.
- With material handling and intralogistics robotics, I see a technology that has come into its own. Advances in mobile robot technology — some with cobots mounted on top — have created unlimited opportunities to apply automation to complex production processes. The ability to summon material, eliminate physically pushing heavy metal parts across a fabshop and improve safety of intra logistics robots are a powerful tool to keep people focused on the knowledge-based tasks we need them to do — raising moral, product quality and productivity in the plant.
- With collaborative robots, we have the opportunity to dramatically improve the productivity of metal shops around the world. With the same people, machines and floor space, manufacturers are finding weeks or even months of additional production time that they can use to add to the topline revenue of their companies. And while there can be some initial worker resistance, fabricators find that employees really appreciate the lifestyle improvements that cobots bring to their workplace. The cobot eliminates tough, physical, dull, repetitive tasks for frontline fabricators, and improvements in software interface design have made cobots easier than ever to program — even by smartphone. By investing in cobots, manufacturers are having their people work with robots and not like robots.
Join Healy at FABTECH 2022 in Atlanta, November 8–10, where he’ll be speaking during the following sessions on manufacturing automation, workforce development and other hot topics:
A Purdue University mechanical engineer who loves to share his passion for automation, Will Healy III is the welding global segment lead at Universal Robots and a board member for the Advanced Manufacturing Industry Partnership (AMIP) in Cincinnati. He speaks from personal experience about people-centric technology investments, managing culture change in organizations, bridging the manufacturing skills gap and creating value through automation. With more than 16 years of experience in a variety of industries including automotive, welding, stamping, white goods and metal fabrication, Healy is published in various trade magazines and has presented internationally at a variety of industry conferences. Follow him on YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn with the handle WillAutomate.
